> I used to read comics as a kid on and off, but stopped at some point.

I relate to this. I always had a few small business ventures going from age 10-18 and all brought in income. I spent most of it on books, records, comics and graphic novels. The only comic book store within walking distance I'd go in there weekly and pick up several titles each time. I'd also look through the racks to find new titles. How I find new titles is I read the beginning and see if I like it. When I do, I start picking up that set as well. All together I was spending around $100 a month of my own money on this stuff, learning about new releases, and telling my friends what the cool stuff was and they would borrow from me and often start buying on their own.

The store owner was pretty unfriendly. One day, I went in as usual and collected to buy around 5 new issues of comics that I was getting each month, then picked up another one I hadn't seen and was flipping through it. The owner came over and started arguing with me, telling me he wasn't "running no fucking library" and I could buy or not buy but reading wasn't allowed.

I was confused and shocked. I said, "You ring me up every week. You know I am in here every week and I buy a hundred bucks worth of titles a month. How am I supposed to find new titles without looking at them?" He said, "I don't give a fuck, but you don't do it using my store as a library."

So I put the titles back and that ended up being the last time I bought serial comics. Completely turned me off to the whole scene.

Yeah, there are good store owners too, but there weren't any within walking distance.

I did tell all my friends what happened though and that shop went out of business a year later.

Now this tale is not really about comics. It's about a lesson in customer service and experience and reality. Customers need to find out about products without having to pay to sample.

Right now, this site sounds good and I am momentarily tempted to get back into buying comics, but then, I'm not really buying them am I. There's DRM and some discussion here about some strange licensing terms. Sounds like I'd be paying a fee to read a title once.

Best to stick with my technical manuals and history books instead, where I actually own the books and know they won't be suddenly taken away from me after I thought I paid. This DRM stuff is even worse than an obnoxious store owner driving away customers. It's certainly just as user hostile as far as I am concerned, and it prevents fans from developing a sense of investment in a given artist; there's never any real buy-in that one gets from sorting through one's little stacks of titles. There's only temporary access, as if you checked it out from the library and you're not going to have it for long. There's a reason we called this collecting comics and not renting them. Collecting comics, like baseball cards, stamps and other serialized artifacts, appeals to the obsessive-compulsion to get the whole set, to have them all, to feel invested in having gotten them all. If you miss seeing a show on TV, you just catch the next one. If you are missing only issue #47 of an entire comic series, you are going to be looking to find it. When you can't keep them on various devices, and can't sell them, and can't leave them to your heirs in your will, you don't own them, you're not invested, and you just don't care. It's amazing that the various art industries that rely on serialized releases of artist branded art such as music and comics don't understand this. How many fans of baseball and Pokemon cards, and even Beanie Babies, would there have been if users were prohibited from owning their "collectibles". Not many.